One of the greatest error messages I’ve ever seen was from a copy of Adobe Photoshop that one of my friends downloaded illegally. Whenever he tried to start it up he got:
ERROR!
could not ELMO! the great ELMO!
As I recall he kept that non-working copy on his hard drive for awhile just to prove that such an error message was real and not something from his imagination.
My boss ordered a touchscreen monitor for his friend’s business and wanted to check it out and see how to set it up.
He worked at it for about a half hour, getting more and more frustrated until he finally gave up. I told him I’d take a look at it and see if I could figure it out (he claims I have a ‘digital index finger’ that can fix electronics just by touching them 
).
It was up and working in under 60 seconds after I plugged in the USB cable for him.
Of course, after a bit of good natured teasing about making such a simple mistake, it came back to bite me in the butt. It was a nice shiny new toy and I was happily touching away experimenting with it until I wanted to change the Desktop settings and tried to right-click on the screen with my middle finger. :smack:
Long, long ago when I was a programmer, my boss called me frantically into his office because a big customer was really pissed and he needed me to fix the problem ASAP. The problem? Our system had called one of his operators a dummy.
I searched frantically through our source code and couldn’t find the word “dummy” anywhere. Things were stewing, because the operator in question worked for a company that had purchased many millions of dollars worth of equipment from us. She had showed the message to her boss, who called a VP, who knew the president of our company, who called my boss’s boss, who called my boss.
I finally got permission to call the operator for more information. She was angry, and couldn’t remember exactly what she was doing when the message popped up. The only clue I got from her was that our system was really, really stupid because it even spelled “dummy” wrong.
That was the information I needed. I soon found the word (spelled as she reported) in our source code and reconstructed the problem.
It seems one of our modules used a “dummy file” while rearranging the directory structure. An error in the code caused it to be deleted prematurely. When the program tried to delete it during wrapup, the delete routine put up an error message saying that it couldn’t find the file, and helpfully provided the filename afterward. The result:
No such file: dumy
sigh
The computer said “Do me!” AND it had the nerve to spell it wrong!
From MANY years ago…
DCL MONTECRISTO BIN FIXED(8); /* THIS IS A COUNT /
DCL CADBURY CHAR(10); / CHOCOLATE DECLARE */
I knew someone once who would always have
#DEFINE of_the_jedi 0
at the top of his C code. Why? So he could end his program with
return of_the_jedi;
Yeah, I have no explanation either.
Rather elderly guy at work who is the most computer illiterate person I have ever come across (well I think he has trouble turning a flashlight on but that is a different matter). Anyway one day he complained his computer wasn’t working so I had a look and he had this message on his screen “Keyboard not found” (or something like that).
I said to him “Bill, your jeyboard is not plugged in- here let me fix it”
e said “Oh that must have happened when I dropped it on the floor”
There are some really ridiculous stupid things that make me giggle uncontrollably for reasons I can’t explain. This has become one of them.
Back in astronomy lab, we were working on a laptop connected to a spectrometer, trying to look at various lamps in the dark. With the mercury lamp and the laptop as our only source of light, things got a little spooky. Our pictures weren’t making any sense, we weren’t finding any of the correct lines. At one point, a certain box in the picture taking program kept getting checked, even after we repeatedly unchecked it. We were convinced the laptop was possessed by a ghost, or aliens.
The fan on our computer was dying, badly.
We had a big ass tower in those days, because my dad, an old-school computer technician, seems to feel that a computer isn’t really a computer unless he can crawl into it. We took the cover off and put a small window fan under there to blow on the motherboard.
Oddly enough, it worked really well.
~Tasha
A buddy of mine modded an actual box fan into a computer. I gotta say, that thing kept cool!